;i2 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the trunk, it would have been carried up, 

 which has not occurred. This is believed 

 by Mr. Lewis to be conclusively shown in 

 the position of the branch in respect to the 

 rock, which surely has not changed its po- 

 sition ; the weight of the rock, above the 

 surface, being probably thirty tons. It is 

 safe to conclude that the branch in ques- 

 tion has rested on the rock, in its present 

 position, at least a hundred years, during 

 which time the trunk of the tree has in- 

 creased in length fifty feet. 



NOTES. 



Prof. Marsh reached his home in New 

 Haven, December 12th, after an absence of 

 about two months in the West. The results 

 of his "scientific raid" to the Bad Lands, 

 near the Black Hills, were very satisfactory. 

 Nearly two tons of fossil bones were col- 

 lected, most of them rare specimens, and 

 many unknown to science. There were 

 several species of gigantic Brontotheridce, 

 nearly as large as elephants. At one place 

 the bones were heaped together in such 

 numbers as to indicate that a herd of the 

 animals had been swept into a lake by a 

 great freshet. The whole collection goes 

 to the Peabody Museum of Yale College. 

 A military escort, provided by General Ord, 

 shared with Prof. Marsh the honors and the 

 perils of the brief but brilliant campaign. 



Prof. Simon Newcomb, of the Wash- 

 ington Observatory, has gone to Europe to 

 examine the different kinds of flint and 

 crown glass made for optical purposes by 

 the best manufacturers abroad. His trip 

 is in the interest of the Lick Observatory 

 of California, the trustees of that institution 

 wishing to employ the best maker for the 

 founding of the glass. 



It is announced that the Phylloxera has 

 made its appearance in Switzerland, and the 

 delegates of the vine-growing cantons are 

 considering the best means of preventing 

 its extension. The volcanic soil around 

 Vesuvius is said to be an antidote to the 

 potato-fungus, and to be of great value in 

 the treatment of Phylloxera. 



Mr. Joseph Willcox, of the Philadel- 

 phia Academy of Sciences, has discovered 

 in North Carolina a number of burial-places 

 where the bodies had been placed with the 

 face up, and covered with a coating of plas- 

 tic clay. A pile of wood was then placed 

 on top and fired, which consumed the body 

 and baked the clay, which retained the 

 form of the body. This was then lightly 

 covered with earth. 



The supposed fossil remains of land- 

 plants, found by Mr. Lesquereux in the up- 

 per portion of the Cincinnati group (Lower 

 Silurian Rocks), near Lebanon, Ohio, are 

 described by Prof. J. S. Newberry, in Silli- 

 inari's Journal. These fossils are to be re- 

 ferred, according to Mr. Lesquereux, to the 

 Sigil/arice, but Prof. Newberry shows that 

 they do not possess the characters which 

 belong to land-plants, and that in all proba- 

 bility they are nothing but casts of the 

 stems of fucoids. 



Prof. Alfred M. Mayer, of the Stevens 

 Institute, has shown, by a series of new 

 and very ingenious experiments, the truth 

 of Prof. Henry's inference that the discharge 

 of a Leyden jar is multiple and oscillatory 

 in its nature. Other physicists had already 

 established this point, but it remained for 

 Prof. Mayer to trace the oscillations and to 

 determine the number of partial discharges 

 per second. In one of his experiments he 

 found the average interval between the par- 

 tial discharges to be ^gVj of a second. 



A tunnel, very nearly one mile in length, 

 has been bored through Musconetcong 

 Mountain, N. J., on the line of the Easton 

 & Perth Amboy Railroad. With the ex- 

 ception of the Hoosac, this is the longest 

 tunnel east of the Mississippi. The engi- 

 neering-work on this tunnel was singularly 

 accurate, the error in line being only half 

 an inch, in levels one-fifth of an inch, in 

 chaining or measurement six inches. 



The climate of Minnesota has been rec- 

 ommended as very favorable to consump- 

 tives, on the ground that the air of that 

 region is exceptionally dry. But, from the 

 Monthly Weather Review of the Signal-Office, 

 for November last, it appears that Minne- 

 sota shows the greatest relative humidity 

 of all the regions there named. Thus, the 

 relative humidity for New England was .69, 

 middle Atlantic States .66, lake region .69, 

 Minnesota .11. 



The Caen Academy of Science offers a 

 prize of 4,000 francs for the best essay on 

 the "Function of Leaves in the Vegetation 

 of Plants." The Academy does not want 

 simply an exposition of the present state of 

 science upon this question, but also exact 

 experiments, performed by the competitors 

 themselves, and new facts tending to throw 

 light upon the present theories. The essays 

 to be submitted before January 1, 1876. 



Prof. Landois reports to the Natural 

 History Society of Prussian Rhineland that 

 ants have the power of producing vocal 

 sounds, though of a pitch inaudible to man. 

 He has proved that they possess a sound- 

 apparatus resembling that belonging to the 

 sand-wasp. 



